Free Tengu by Graham Masterton Page A

have to be
shy.”
    “I was here, in
bed,” said Mack. “Olive will tell you.”
    Skrolnik raised
an eyebrow. Olive was a glittering, glossy-looking black girl, and she stalked
into the living room with her dreadlocks shaking and her head held defiantly
erect. She was wrapped in a thin flowered-silk sarong which barely concealed
her enormous bouncing breasts. She was pretty in a wide-eyed, 1960’s
Tamla-Motown kind of way, and there were jingling gold bells around her left
ankle. She paused, with her hand on her hip, and said, “That’s right. He was
here, all right.”
    Skrolnik said,
“The poorer the nabes, the fancier the domestic help. What’s your name, miss?”
    “It’s Mrs.,”
said the black girl. “Mrs. Robin T. Nesmith, Jr. But you can call me Mrs.
Nesmith.”
    “Where’s Mr.
Nesmith? Hiding under the comforter?”
    “Mr. Nesmith is
in Honolulu, with the U.S. Navy.”
    “And this is
the thanks he gets, for serving his country?”
    “I don’t see
that it’s any of your business,” said Olive, “but Mr. Ncsmith knows about it.
He reckons it’s better the devil you know.”
    Skrolnik chewed
thoughtfully. “Even when the devil’s a white devil?”
    “Mr. Nesmith is
white, too.”
    “I see. Can
anyone else substantiate your whereabouts?”
    Mack put his
arm around Olive and drew her closer. He said, “A couple of friends called on
the telephone just before eight. But that’s all.”
    “Give Detective
Arthur their names, will you?” asked Skrolnik.
    Detective
Arthur took out his notebook and his ballpoint, while Skrolnik turned his back
on them and went to investigate the bedroom. There was a wide, sagging bed
covered by stained red satin sheets. The room smelled of perfume and sex, and a
blue tin ashtray beside the bed exuded its own peculiar fragrance. The walls
were papered with faded floribunda roses.
    Skrolnik stood
there for a while, chewing and thinking. In one corner of the room, on the
floor, were a paperback edition of H. R. Haldeman’s The Ends of Power and a
tiny pair of transparent purple panties.
    The incongruity
of human life, he thought.
    He came back
into the living room. Olive was sitting on one of the basketwork chairs, and
Mack was stepping into a pair of newish Levi’s. The jeans were so tight that he
had difficulty zipping them up over his cock. Skrolnik said, “Need a shoehorn?”
    Mack picked up
a T-shirt with Snoquaimie National Forest printed on it. “You must be the life
and soul of the squadroom.”
    “Mr. Holt,”
Skrolnik retorted, “if you saw people torn apart the way that Sherry Cantor was
torn apart, then you’d understand just what it is that makes me talk the way I
do. After despair, there’s nothing left but humor.”
    Without raising
his eyes, Mack asked, “Was she hurt? I mean, do you think she felt anything?”
Olive reached up and held his hand. Skrolnik said, “We don’t know.”
    “I guess you’re
going to ask me if I knew anyone who could have done something like that,”
    Mack told him.
“But I didn’t before, and I still don’t. She used to get to people sometimes.
She used to get to me. But that was only because life seemed so easy for her.
There she was, fresh out of Indiana and raw as an onion, and success fell
straight in her lap. That was what finished us, in the end, Sherry and me. And
what made it worst of all, she was so nice about it.
She used to say that success wouldn’t change her, and it damn well didn’t. She
was just so damn nice.”
    “That’s what I
thought,” Skrolnik said, mostly to himself. “And that’s what makes it look like
this homicide wasn’t premeditated. Not for any personal
reason, anyhow.”
    Olive kept hold
of Mack’s hand and stroked the back of it with her long, dusky fingers. “Do you
think you’re going to catch the guy who did it?” she asked Skrolnik.
    Skrolnik
grimaced.
    Detective
Arthur said, “Where are you working now, Mr. Holt? I have you down as a
car-parking jockey at the i